WHY DRAW A TREE

This post is the first in a series titled WHY DRAW A TREE. It is something that I have been thinking about for awhile and because I will be teaching two weekend classes in June where we will be drawing trees I have decided to do it now. The posts will feature work by artists, living and deceased, who have inspired my own drawings and paintings of trees over the past thirty years. I will focus on drawings in black and white but also include paintings. 

CYPRESSES, 1889, SAINT-REMY-DE-PROVENCE, FRANCE

VINCENT VAN GOGH

CYPRESSES, POLLARDED TREES, AND ROOTS

From 1888 to 1890 Van Gogh found solace or perhaps an identification with cypress trees. The cypress tree is a symbol of death and perhaps this was a reflection of his state of mind right before his own death in 1890. Regardless, these late drawings and paintings of the cypress tree are full of the life that all his work expresses with his variety of swirling lines animating the tree and the landscape surrounding it.  He was also very aware of the challenges of painting the landscape and in a letter to his brother Theo he wrote "-(The cypress) is the dark patch in a sun-drenched landscape, but it's one of the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine."

POLLARD BIRCHES, 1884

pencil, pen and ink watercolor on paper

LANDSCAPE WITH PATH AND POLLARD BIRCHES, 1888

Pollarding trees is a common practice in much of Europe including his native Netherlands. He compared a row of pollarded trees to a "procession of orphan men". The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom in his book Roads to Santiago, compares them to "...armies naked and unmoving, lined up as if for battle, marching into your dreams at night." The way their gnarled trunks lean into space give the feeling that they will uproot themselves and start walking into the landscape. Van Gogh loved these trees and they featured prominently in his drawings and paintings. 

TWO TREES

PINES ALONG A ROAD TO A HOUSE 

I love the gestural quality of these two drawings. It is as if you can feel the wind moving through the branches. The use of a few lines is enough to depict the ground the trees are growing in. 

TREE ROOTS, JULY 1890, AUVERS-SUR-OISE, FRANCE

This painting Tree Roots is thought to be the last piece he worked on the day he suffered a fatal gunshot wound. Van Gogh also made a drawing of tree roots when he lived in The Hague in 1882. In a letter to his brother Theo he wrote that he wanted it to "express something of life's struggle" and looking at it as "Frantically and fervently rooting itself, as it were, in the earth, and yet being half torn up by the storm."

"DRAWING IS AT THE ROOT OF EVERYTHING"

VINCENT VAN GOGH